The Twitterati can claim a victory of sorts: communications minister Ed Vaizey will soon meet civil society representatives who were excluded from his by-invitation-only meeting with copyright holders on blocking websites and users.

Vaizey offered the meeting after a Twitter rant by blogger James Firth
on how the government was making policy and legislation behind closed doors, closeted with Big Business such as the Premier League, the Publishers Association, BPI, and the Motion Picture Association.

The only civil society body invited was Consumer Focus, but the Open Rights Group and Firth both received leaked copies of the working documents, which the ORG published here.

Coadec, the Coalition for a Digital Economy, has offered to set up the meeting.

Hargreaves’ suggestions have been widely welcomed by new media types, particularly for his suggestion of a Digital Copyright Exchange. The DCE, he says, will make it easier for creative types to get paid for their work, and for people who want to use copyright material to track down the owners for permission.

If Britain were to make effective use of digital copyright, it would add between 0.3% and 0.6% to GDP, he said.

Speakers included Hargreaves himself, the outspoken Lord Lucas, head of the Digital Economy All Party Parliamentary Group MP Eric Joyce, as well as Stefan Glaenzer, a Flattr investor, and Nico Perez, CEO of Mixcloud, which aims to do for audio what YouTube did for video.

It may well have been @DML. Apologies if I got it wrong. The important thing is that Vaizey and other MPs hear an alternative voice to that of the rightsholders if the UK is to make the most of its intellectual property, instead of continuing to hand most of it to US and Japanese shareholders.